June 26, 2023
Yu (Tokyo Ueno Station) draws on her Korean Japanese family history in this resonant if overstuffed saga. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol jogs every morning to train for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. In the present day, his granddaughter, Yu Miri, is living in Japan, where she trains to run a marathon and wrestles with her dual heritage (“When I can’t express my feelings I speak Korean”). Adding to the autobiographical elements are intriguing slices of history, such as the Korean Heroic Corps, a resistance movement founded in 1919 by Kim Won-bong, and the “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Central to it all are themes of Korean defiance and alienation, glued together by the bittersweet story of Woo-cheol, who’d hoped to bring glory to Korea in the Olympics before Japan’s invasion and the Games’ eventual cancellation. Some readers will certainly wonder if they can go the distance, but the prose is artful and kinetic (“My breath is a whip in my heart a red horse running around inside me/ each drop of sweat becomes a shout and is shaken off”). Though it doesn’t reach the height of Yu’s previous work in translation, this has a power of its own. Agent: Michael Staley, Michael Staley Agency.
